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.³w He did not buy the volumes of the Encyclopédie,and they are cited rarely and with little approval anywhere in hiswritings.³x In the Mémoires de l Académie he discovered a world of Frencherudition which impressed him no less greatly than did that of theHuguenot diaspora, and was in its own way equally Enlightened.Towhat extent he thought he was defending these érudits against thephilosophes, and to what extent he might have been justified in thinkingso, are questions yet to be considered; and it is necessary to set theerudition of the Académie in its proper place challenged but notaltogether defeated before proceeding to d Alembert s Discours pré-liminaire and Gibbon s response to it in his Essai.³u Grell, 1993, p.22.³v Above, p.141.³w Memoirs, p.97 (A, p.164, Memoir B).³x Womersley, iii, p.1214. chapter 7Erudition and Enlightenment in the Académiedes InscriptionsGibbon embarked upon and completed the Essai sur l étude de la littératurein the belief that erudition was under attack from d Alembert; may weadd and those whom d Alembert led and represented ? Neither theEssai nor the Memoirs is very specific in naming or defining sucha group,and what the latter work has to say is better postponed until we considerGibbon s visit to Paris after the Essai was published.¹ We have, however,by now encountered the notion of a separation and perhaps an op-position between erudition and philosophy , and the language of theMemoirs indicates that Gibbon had come to think that a philosophicage ² was making light of the detailed textual scholarship he came toassociate with the notion of history.If this was in his mind between 1758and 1762, he may have seen d Alembert s Discours préliminaire and theEncyclopédie it introduced as a vast philosophic offensive against values heset out to defend; but we should be cautious in ascribing to Gibbon ourperception of the Encyclopédie as a grand event, complex but unified, inthe history of the European mind.By the time the Memoirs were beingwritten Gibbon left them unfinished and unpublished Burke (whosepresence may be found in them) had characterised the vast undertakingof the Encyclopedia as an event not a little important in what he believed these gentlemen , the gens de lettres, aimed to carry out;³ Gibbon, how-ever, referred to it simply as their immense compilation and the Declineand Fall does not make much of it.t We should beware, then, ofhypostasising the Encyclopédie and setting Gibbon in opposition to all wesay it stood for; there is the more challenging hypothesis that it did notmean a great deal to him.He was, in the Memoirs, dismissive of his Essaiwritten against d Alembert, and the significances we are going to dis-¹ Below, chapter 10.² Memoirs, p.99 (A, p.167).³ Burke, 1791, p.97.t Womersley, iii, p.1214, for references to the Encyclopédie.152 The Académie des Inscriptions 153cover in it during the next few chapters were not necessarily apparent tothe historian of the Roman empire.That erudition, and even the materials of erudition, were underattack from the intellects we call philosophical Gibbon did not need theEncyclopédie to tell him.In an incomplete essay on Livy written atLausanne, he remembered having seen it somewhere in Bolingbroke,uand this may be an allusion to information or reading supplied by Davidor Lucy Mallet.In bothFrance and England Lausanne may have beenanother story there is reason to suppose that a language of contemptfor érudits and antiquaries (we have yet to consider exactly who theywere) was so widespread in polite conversation that we do not need verymuchtextual evidence for Gibbon s awareness of it.His encounter withthe Discours préliminaire may have been no more than a culmination orlast straw.On the other hand, we have found reason to be careful in assessing ladéfaite de l erudition, which means less that erudition was driven from thefield than that it encountered opposition and was prevented fromdominating it.The history of intellect, notably in the France of theacadémies, records a politics of hegemony and contestation, and in theEssai sur l étude de la littérature we shall find Gibbon organising a criticalhistory around this fact.It does not follow, however, that there was apolitique à l outrance, that the philosophes aimed to destroy or even defeat theérudits, or that the latter did not share some of the values of the former,which in turn we must be careful not to over-simplify [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]